is the
author of Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother and Tender Hooks, praised by Albert Goldbarth for its "deep smarts, high spirits, and dead-on kick-ass language." Her first book, Open House, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and was a Book Sense Top Ten poetry pick. A professor of English at the University of Mississippi, Fennelly lives with her husband and children in Oxford, Mississippi.

"With its high spirits, its love of textures of different kinds of writing, its search for ways to frame ambitious energies ... Fennelly's poetry advances with a determination to keep the author interested and alive to her materials; in places amused with itself and hopscotching, in places veering into unexpected depths ... an immensely lively performance."Robert Hass